But when
this language, with all its products and acquisitions, matured by ages
on its own mother soil, is carried into foreign lands, which have
their own separate history and their own life-growth, it must
constantly hamper the indigenous growth of culture and destroy
individuality of judgement and the perfect freedom of self-expression.
this language, with all its products and acquisitions, matured by ages
on its own mother soil, is carried into foreign lands, which have
their own separate history and their own life-growth, it must
constantly hamper the indigenous growth of culture and destroy
individuality of judgement and the perfect freedom of self-expression.
Tagore - Creative Unity
With the discovery and
development of agriculture there came a period of settled life in our
history. The nomad ever moved on with his tents and cattle; he
explored space and exploited its contents. The cultivator of land
explored time in its immensity, for he had leisure. Comparatively
secured from the uncertainty of his outer resources, he had the
opportunity to deal with his moral resources in the realm of human
truth. This is why agricultural civilisation, like that of India and
China, is essentially a civilisation of human relationship, of the
adjustment of mutual obligations. It is deep-rooted in the inner life
of man. Its basis is co-operation and not competition. In other words,
its principle is the principle of home, to which all its outer
adventures are subordinated.
In the meanwhile, the nomadic life with its predatory instinct of
exploitation has developed into a great civilisation. It is immensely
proud and strong, killing leisure and pursuing opportunities. It
minimises the claims of personal relationship and is jealously careful
of its unhampered freedom for acquiring wealth and asserting its will
upon others. Its burden is the burden of things, which grows heavier
and more complex every day, disregarding the human and the spiritual.
Its powerful pressure from all sides narrows the limits of home, the
personal region of the human world. Thus, in this region of life,
women are every day hustled out of their shelter for want of
accommodation.
But such a state of things can never have the effect of changing woman
into man. On the contrary, it will lead her to find her place in the
unlimited range of society, and the Guardian Spirit of the personal in
human nature will extend the ministry of woman over all developments
of life. Habituated to deal with the world as a machine, man is
multiplying his materials, banishing away his happiness and
sacrificing love to comfort, which is an illusion. At last the present
age has sent its cry to woman, asking her to come out from her
segregation in order to restore the spiritual supremacy of all that is
human in the world of humanity. She has been aroused to remember that
womanliness is not chiefly decorative. It is like that vital health,
which not only imparts the bloom of beauty to the body, but joy to the
mind and perfection to life.
AN EASTERN UNIVERSITY
In the midst of much that is discouraging in the present state of the
world, there is one symptom of vital promise. Asia is awakening. This
great event, if it be but directed along the right lines, is full of
hope, not only for Asia herself, but for the whole world.
On the other hand, it has to be admitted that the relationship of the
West with the East, growing more and more complex and widespread for
over two centuries, far from attaining its true fulfilment, has given
rise to a universal spirit of conflict. The consequent strain and
unrest have profoundly disturbed Asia, and antipathetic forces have
been accumulating for years in the depth of the Eastern mind.
The meeting of the East and the West has remained incomplete, because
the occasions of it have not been disinterested. The political and
commercial adventures carried on by Western races--very often by
force and against the interest and wishes of the countries they have
dealt with--have created a moral alienation, which is deeply injurious
to both parties. The perils threatened by this unnatural relationship
have long been contemptuously ignored by the West. But the blind
confidence of the strong in their apparent invincibility has often led
them, from their dream of security, into terrible surprises of
history.
It is not the fear of danger or loss to one people or another,
however, which is most important. The demoralising influence of the
constant estrangement between the two hemispheres, which affects the
baser passions of man,--pride, greed and hypocrisy on the one hand;
fear, suspiciousness and flattery on the other,--has been developing,
and threatens us with a world-wide spiritual disaster.
The time has come when we must use all our wisdom to understand the
situation, and to control it, with a stronger trust in moral guidance
than in any array of physical forces.
In the beginning of man's history his first social object was to form
a community, to grow into a people. At that early period, individuals
were gathered together within geographical enclosures. But in the
present age, with its facility of communication, geographical barriers
have almost lost their reality, and the great federation of men, which
is waiting either to find its true scope or to break asunder in a
final catastrophe, is not a meeting of individuals, but of various
human races. Now the problem before us is of one single country, which
is this earth, where the races as individuals must find both their
freedom of self-expression and their bond of federation. Mankind must
realise a unity, wider in range, deeper in sentiment, stronger in
power than ever before. Now that the problem is large, we have to
solve it on a bigger scale, to realise the God in man by a larger
faith and to build the temple of our faith on a sure and world-wide
basis.
The first step towards realisation is to create opportunities for
revealing the different peoples to one another. This can never be done
in those fields where the exploiting utilitarian spirit is supreme. We
must find some meeting-ground, where there can be no question of
conflicting interests. One of such places is the University, where we
can work together in a common pursuit of truth, share together our
common heritage, and realise that artists in all parts of the world
have created forms of beauty, scientists discovered secrets of the
universe, philosophers solved the problems of existence, saints made
the truth of the spiritual world organic in their own lives, not
merely for some particular race to which they belonged, but for all
mankind. When the science of meteorology knows the earth's atmosphere
as continuously one, affecting the different parts of the world
differently, but in a harmony of adjustments, it knows and attains
truth. And so, too, we must know that the great mind of man is one,
working through the many differences which are needed to ensure the
full result of its fundamental unity. When we understand this truth in
a disinterested spirit, it teaches us to respect all the differences
in man that are real, yet remain conscious of our oneness; and to know
that perfection of unity is not in uniformity, but in harmony.
This is the problem of the present age. The East, for its own sake and
for the sake of the world, must not remain unrevealed. The deepest
source of all calamities in history is misunderstanding. For where we
do not understand, we can never be just.
Being strongly impressed with the need and the responsibility, which
every individual to-day must realise according to his power, I have
formed the nucleus of an International University in India, as one of
the best means of promoting mutual understanding between the East and
the West. This Institution, according to the plan I have in mind, will
invite students from the West to study the different systems of Indian
philosophy, literature, art and music in their proper environment,
encouraging them to carry on research work in collaboration with the
scholars already engaged in this task.
India has her renaissance. She is preparing to make her contribution
to the world of the future. In the past she produced her great
culture, and in the present age she has an equally important
contribution to make to the culture of the New World which is emerging
from the wreckage of the Old. This is a momentous period of her
history, pregnant with precious possibilities, when any disinterested
offer of co-operation from any part of the West will have an immense
moral value, the memory of which will become brighter as the
regeneration of the East grows in vigour and creative power.
The Western Universities give their students an opportunity to learn
what all the European peoples have contributed to their Western
culture. Thus the intellectual mind of the West has been luminously
revealed to the world. What is needed to complete this illumination is
for the East to collect its own scattered lamps and offer them to the
enlightenment of the world.
There was a time when the great countries of Asia had, each of them,
to nurture its own civilisation apart in comparative seclusion. Now
has come the age of co-ordination and co-operation. The seedlings that
were reared within narrow plots must now be transplanted into the open
fields. They must pass the test of the world-market, if their maximum
value is to be obtained.
But before Asia is in a position to co-operate with the culture of
Europe, she must base her own structure on a synthesis of all the
different cultures which she has. When, taking her stand on such a
culture, she turns toward the West, she will take, with a confident
sense of mental freedom, her own view of truth, from her own
vantage-ground, and open a new vista of thought to the world.
Otherwise, she will allow her priceless inheritance to crumble into
dust, and, trying to replace it clumsily with feeble imitations of the
West, make herself superfluous, cheap and ludicrous. If she thus
loses her individuality and her specific power to exist, will it in
the least help the rest of the world? Will not her terrible bankruptcy
involve also the Western mind? If the whole world grows at last into
an exaggerated West, then such an illimitable parody of the modern age
will die, crushed beneath its own absurdity.
In this belief, it is my desire to extend by degrees the scope of this
University on simple lines, until it comprehends the whole range of
Eastern cultures--the Aryan, Semitic, Mongolian and others. Its object
will be to reveal the Eastern mind to the world.
Of one thing I felt certain during my travels in Europe, that a
genuine interest has been roused there in the philosophy and the arts
of the East, from which the Western mind seeks fresh inspiration of
truth and beauty. Once the East had her reputation of fabulous wealth,
and the seekers were attracted from across the sea. Since then, the
shrine of wealth has changed its site. But the East is famed also for
her storage of wisdom, harvested by her patriarchs from long
successive ages of spiritual endeavour. And when, as now, in the midst
of the pursuit of power and wealth, there rises the cry of privation
from the famished spirit of man, an opportunity is offered to the East
to offer her store to those who need it.
Once upon a time we were in possession of such a thing as our own mind
in India. It was living. It thought, it felt, it expressed itself. It
was receptive as well as productive. That this mind could be of any
use in the process, or in the end, of our education was overlooked by
our modern educational dispensation. We are provided with buildings
and books and other magnificent burdens calculated to suppress our
mind. The latter was treated like a library-shelf solidly made of
wood, to be loaded with leather-bound volumes of second-hand
information. In consequence, it has lost its own colour and character,
and has borrowed polish from the carpenter's shop. All this has cost
us money, and also our finer ideas, while our intellectual vacancy has
been crammed with what is described in official reports as Education.
In fact, we have bought our spectacles at the expense of our eyesight.
In India our goddess of learning is _Saraswati_. My audience in the
West, I am sure, will be glad to know that her complexion is white.
But the signal fact is that she is living and she is a woman, and her
seat is on a lotus-flower. The symbolic meaning of this is, that she
dwells in the centre of life and the heart of all existence, which
opens itself in beauty to the light of heaven.
The Western education which we have chanced to know is impersonal. Its
complexion is also white, but it is the whiteness of the white-washed
class-room walls. It dwells in the cold-storage compartments of
lessons and the ice-packed minds of the schoolmasters. The effect
which it had on my mind when, as a boy, I was compelled to go to
school, I have described elsewhere. My feeling was very much the same
as a tree might have, which was not allowed to live its full life, but
was cut down to be made into packing-cases.
The introduction of this education was not a part of the solemn
marriage ceremony which was to unite the minds of the East and West in
mutual understanding. It represented an artificial method of training
specially calculated to produce the carriers of the white man's
burden. This want of ideals still clings to our education system,
though our Universities have latterly burdened their syllabus with a
greater number of subjects than before. But it is only like adding to
the bags of wheat the bullock carries to market; it does not make the
bullock any better off.
Mind, when long deprived of its natural food of truth and freedom of
growth, develops an unnatural craving for success; and our students
have fallen victims to the mania for success in examinations. Success
consists in obtaining the largest number of marks with the strictest
economy of knowledge. It is a deliberate cultivation of disloyalty to
truth, of intellectual dishonesty, of a foolish imposition by which
the mind is encouraged to rob itself. But as we are by means of it
made to forget the existence of mind, we are supremely happy at the
result. We pass examinations, and shrivel up into clerks, lawyers and
police inspectors, and we die young.
Universities should never be made into mechanical organisations for
collecting and distributing knowledge. Through them the people should
offer their intellectual hospitality, their wealth of mind to others,
and earn their proud right in return to receive gifts from the rest of
the world. But in the whole length and breadth of India there is not a
single University established in the modern time where a foreign or
an Indian student can properly be acquainted with the best products
of the Indian mind. For that we have to cross the sea, and knock at
the doors of France and Germany. Educational institutions in our
country are India's alms-bowl of knowledge; they lower our
intellectual self-respect; they encourage us to make a foolish display
of decorations composed of borrowed feathers.
This it was that led me to found a school in Bengal, in face of many
difficulties and discouragements, and in spite of my own vocation as a
poet, who finds his true inspiration only when he forgets that he is a
schoolmaster. It is my hope that in this school a nucleus has been
formed, round which an indigenous University of our own land will find
its natural growth--a University which will help India's mind to
concentrate and to be fully conscious of itself; free to seek the
truth and make this truth its own wherever found, to judge by its own
standard, give expression to its own creative genius, and offer its
wisdom to the guests who come from other parts of the world.
Man's intellect has a natural pride in its own aristocracy, which is
the pride of its culture. Culture only acknowledges the excellence
whose criticism is in its inner perfection, not in any external
success. When this pride succumbs to some compulsion of necessity or
lure of material advantage, it brings humiliation to the intellectual
man. Modern India, through her very education, has been made to suffer
this humiliation. Once she herself provided her children with a
culture which was the product of her own ages of thought and creation.
But it has been thrust aside, and we are made to tread the mill of
passing examinations, not for learning anything, but for notifying
that we are qualified for employments under organisations conducted in
English. Our educated community is not a cultured community, but a
community of qualified candidates. Meanwhile the proportion of
possible employments to the number of claimants has gradually been
growing narrower, and the consequent disaffection has been widespread.
At last the very authorities who are responsible for this are blaming
their victims. Such is the perversity of human nature. It bears its
worst grudge against those it has injured.
It is as if some tribe which had the primitive habit of decorating its
tribal members with birds' plumage were some day to hold these very
birds guilty of the crime of being extinct. There are belated
attempts on the part of our governors to read us pious homilies about
disinterested love of learning, while the old machinery goes on
working, whose product is not education but certificates. It is good
to remind the fettered bird that its wings are for soaring; but it is
better to cut the chain which is holding it to its perch. The most
pathetic feature of the tragedy is that the bird itself has learnt to
use its chain for its ornament, simply because the chain jingles in
fairly respectable English.
In the Bengali language there is a modern maxim which can be
translated, "He who learns to read and write rides in a carriage and
pair. " In English there is a similar proverb, "Knowledge is power. " It
is an offer of a prospective bribe to the student, a promise of an
ulterior reward which is more important than knowledge itself.
Temptations, held before us as inducements to be good or to pursue
uncongenial paths, are most often flimsy lies or half-truths, such as
the oft-quoted maxim of respectable piety, "Honesty is the best
policy," at which politicians all over the world seem to laugh in
their sleeves. But unfortunately, education conducted under a special
providence of purposefulness, of eating the fruit of knowledge from
the wrong end, _does_ lead one to that special paradise on earth, the
daily rides in one's own carriage and pair. And the West, I have heard
from authentic sources, is aspiring in its education after that
special cultivation of worldliness.
Where society is comparatively simple and obstructions are not too
numerous, we can clearly see how the life-process guides education in
its vital purpose. The system of folk-education, which is indigenous
to India, but is dying out, was one with the people's life. It flowed
naturally through the social channels and made its way everywhere. It
is a system of widespread irrigation of culture. Its teachers,
specially trained men, are in constant requisition, and find crowded
meetings in our villages, where they repeat the best thoughts and
express the ideals of the land in the most effective form. The mode of
instruction includes the recitation of epics, expounding of the
scriptures, reading from the Puranas, which are the classical records
of old history, performance of plays founded upon the early myths and
legends, dramatic narration of the lives of ancient heroes, and the
singing in chorus of songs from the old religious literature.
Evidently, according to this system, the best function of education
is to enable us to realise that to live as a man is great, requiring
profound philosophy for its ideal, poetry for its expression, and
heroism in its conduct. Owing to this vital method of culture the
common people of India, though technically illiterate, have been made
conscious of the sanctity of social relationships, entailing constant
sacrifice and self-control, urged and supported by ideals collectively
expressed in one word, _Dharma_.
Such a system of education may sound too simple for the complexities
of modern life. But the fundamental principle of social life in its
different stages of development remains the same; and in no
circumstance can the truth be ignored that all human complexities must
harmonise in organic unity with life, failing which there will be
endless conflict. Most things in the civilised world occupy more than
their legitimate space. Much of their burden is needless. By bearing
this burden civilised man may be showing great strength, but he
displays little skill. To the gods, viewing this from on high, it must
seem like the flounderings of a giant who has got out of his depth and
knows not how to swim.
The main source of all forms of voluntary slavery is the desire of
gain. It is difficult to fight against this when modern civilisation
is tainted with such a universal contamination of avarice. I have
realised it myself in the little boys of my own school. For the first
few years there is no trouble. But as soon as the upper class is
reached, their worldly wisdom--the malady of the aged--begins to
assert itself. They rebelliously insist that they must no longer
learn, but rather pass examinations. Professions in the modern age are
more numerous and lucrative than ever before. They need specialisation
of training and knowledge, tempting education to yield its spiritual
freedom to the claims of utilitarian ambitions. But man's deeper
nature is hurt; his smothered life seeks to be liberated from the
suffocating folds and sensual ties of prosperity. And this is why we
find almost everywhere in the world a growing dissatisfaction with the
prevalent system of teaching, which betrays the encroachment of
senility and worldly prudence over pure intellect.
In India, also, a vague feeling of discontent has given rise to
numerous attempts at establishing national schools and colleges. But,
unfortunately, our very education has been successful in depriving us
of our real initiative and our courage of thought. The training we get
in our schools has the constant implication in it that it is not for
us to produce but to borrow. And we are casting about to borrow our
educational plans from European institutions. The trampled plants of
Indian corn are dreaming of recouping their harvest from the
neighbouring wheat fields. To change the figure, we forget that, for
proficiency in walking, it is better to train the muscles of our own
legs than to strut upon wooden ones of foreign make, although they
clatter and cause more surprise at our skill in using them than if
they were living and real.
But when we go to borrow help from a foreign neighbourhood we are apt
to overlook the real source of help behind all that is external and
apparent. Had the deep-water fishes happened to produce a scientist
who chose the jumping of a monkey for his research work, I am sure he
would give most of the credit to the branches of the trees and very
little to the monkey itself. In a foreign University we see the
branching wildernesses of its buildings, furniture, regulations, and
syllabus, but the monkey, which is a difficult creature to catch and
more difficult to manufacture, we are likely to treat as a mere
accident of minor importance. It is convenient for us to overlook the
fact that among the Europeans the living spirit of the University is
widely spread in their society, their parliament, their literature,
and the numerous activities of their corporate life. In all these
functions they are in perpetual touch with the great personality of
the land which is creative and heroic in its constant acts of
self-expression and self-sacrifice. They have their thoughts published
in their books as well as through the medium of living men who think
those thoughts, and who criticise, compare and disseminate them. Some
at least of the drawbacks of their academic education are redeemed by
the living energy of the intellectual personality pervading their
social organism. It is like the stagnant reservoir of water which
finds its purification in the showers of rain to which it keeps itself
open. But, to our misfortune, we have in India all the furniture of
the European University except the human teacher. We have, instead,
mere purveyors of book-lore in whom the paper god of the bookshop has
been made vocal.
A most important truth, which we are apt to forget, is that a teacher
can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself. A lamp can
never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame.
The teacher who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living
traffic with his knowledge, but merely repeats his lessons to his
students, can only load their minds; he cannot quicken them. Truth not
only must inform but inspire. If the inspiration dies out, and the
information only accumulates, then truth loses its infinity. The
greater part of our learning in the schools has been wasted because,
for most of our teachers, their subjects are like dead specimens of
once living things, with which they have a learned acquaintance, but
no communication of life and love.
The educational institution, therefore, which I have in mind has
primarily for its object the constant pursuit of truth, from which the
imparting of truth naturally follows. It must not be a dead cage in
which living minds are fed with food artificially prepared. It should
be an open house, in which students and teachers are at one. They must
live their complete life together, dominated by a common aspiration
for truth and a need of sharing all the delights of culture. In former
days the great master-craftsmen had students in their workshops where
they co-operated in shaping things to perfection. That was the place
where knowledge could become living--that knowledge which not only has
its substance and law, but its atmosphere subtly informed by a
creative personality. For intellectual knowledge also has its aspect
of creative art, in which the man who explores truth expresses
something which is human in him--his enthusiasm, his courage, his
sacrifice, his honesty, and his skill. In merely academical teaching
we find subjects, but not the man who pursues the subjects; therefore
the vital part of education remains incomplete.
For our Universities we must claim, not labelled packages of truth and
authorised agents to distribute them, but truth in its living
association with her lovers and seekers and discoverers. Also we must
know that the concentration of the mind-forces scattered throughout
the country is the most important mission of a University, which, like
the nucleus of a living cell, should be the centre of the intellectual
life of the people.
The bringing about of an intellectual unity in India is, I am told,
difficult to the verge of impossibility owing to the fact that India
has so many different languages. Such a statement is as unreasonable
as to say that man, because he has a diversity of limbs, should find
it impossible to realise life's unity in himself, and that only an
earthworm composed of a tail and nothing else could truly know that it
had a body.
Let us admit that India is not like any one of the great countries of
Europe, which has its own separate language; but is rather like Europe
herself, branching out into different peoples with many different
languages. And yet Europe has a common civilisation, with an
intellectual unity which is not based upon uniformity of language. It
is true that in the earlier stages of her culture the whole of Europe
had Latin for her learned tongue. That was in her intellectual budding
time, when all her petals of self-expression were closed in one point.
But the perfection of her mental unfolding was not represented by the
singularity of her literary vehicle. When the great European countries
found their individual languages, then only the true federation of
cultures became possible in the West, and the very differences of the
channels made the commerce of ideas in Europe so richly copious and so
variedly active. We can well imagine what the loss to European
civilisation would be if France, Italy and Germany, and England
herself, had not through their separate agencies contributed to the
common coffer their individual earnings.
There was a time with us when India had her common language of culture
in Sanskrit. But, for the complete commerce of her thought, she
required that all her vernaculars should attain their perfect powers,
through which her different peoples might manifest their
idiosyncrasies; and this could never be done through a foreign tongue.
In the United States, in Canada and other British Colonies, the
language of the people is English. It has a great literature which had
its birth and growth in the history of the British Islands.
But when
this language, with all its products and acquisitions, matured by ages
on its own mother soil, is carried into foreign lands, which have
their own separate history and their own life-growth, it must
constantly hamper the indigenous growth of culture and destroy
individuality of judgement and the perfect freedom of self-expression.
The inherited wealth of the English language, with all its splendour,
becomes an impediment when taken into different surroundings, just as
when lungs are given to the whale in the sea. If such is the case even
with races whose grandmother-tongue naturally continues to be their
own mother-tongue, one can imagine what sterility it means for a
people which accepts, for its vehicle of culture, an altogether
foreign language. A language is not like an umbrella or an overcoat,
that can be borrowed by unconscious or deliberate mistake; it is like
the living skin itself. If the body of a draught-horse enters into the
skin of a race-horse, it will be safe to wager that such an anomaly
will never win a race, and will fail even to drag a cart. Have we not
watched some modern Japanese artists imitating European art? The
imitation may sometimes produce clever results; but such cleverness
has only the perfection of artificial flowers which never bear fruit.
All great countries have their vital centres for intellectual life,
where a high standard of learning is maintained, where the minds of
the people are naturally attracted, where they find their genial
atmosphere, in which to prove their worth and to contribute their
share to the country's culture. Thus they kindle, on the common altar
of the land, that great sacrificial fire which can radiate the sacred
light of wisdom abroad.
Athens was such a centre in Greece, Rome in Italy; and Paris is such
to-day in France. Benares has been and still continues to be the
centre of our Sanskrit culture. But Sanskrit learning does not exhaust
all the elements of culture that exist in modern India.
If we were to take for granted, what some people maintain, that
Western culture is the only source of light for our mind, then it
would be like depending for daybreak upon some star, which is the sun
of a far distant sphere. The star may give us light, but not the day;
it may give us direction in our voyage of exploration, but it can
never open the full view of truth before our eyes. In fact, we can
never use this cold starlight for stirring the sap in our branches,
and giving colour and bloom to our life. This is the reason why
European education has become for India mere school lessons and no
culture; a box of matches, good for the small uses of illumination,
but not the light of morning, in which the use and beauty, and all the
subtle mysteries of life are blended in one.
Let me say clearly that I have no distrust of any culture because of
its foreign character. On the contrary, I believe that the shock of
such extraneous forces is necessary for the vitality of our
intellectual nature. It is admitted that much of the spirit of
Christianity runs counter, not only to the classical culture of
Europe, but to the European temperament altogether. And yet this alien
movement of ideas, constantly running against the natural mental
current of Europe, has been a most important factor in strengthening
and enriching her civilisation, on account of the sharp antagonism of
its intellectual direction. In fact, the European vernaculars first
woke up to life and fruitful vigour when they felt the impact of this
foreign thought-power with all its oriental forms and affinities. The
same thing is happening in India. The European culture has come to us,
not only with its knowledge, but with its velocity.
Then, again, let us admit that modern Science is Europe's great gift
to humanity for all time to come. We, in India, must claim it from her
hands, and gratefully accept it in order to be saved from the curse of
futility by lagging behind. We shall fail to reap the harvest of the
present age if we delay.
What I object to is the artificial arrangement by which foreign
education tends to occupy all the space of our national mind, and thus
kills, or hampers, the great opportunity for the creation of a new
thought-power by a new combination of truths. It is this which makes
me urge that all the elements in our own culture have to be
strengthened, not to resist the Western culture, but truly to accept
and assimilate it; to use it for our sustenance, not as our burden; to
get mastery over this culture, and not to live on its outskirts as the
hewers of texts and drawers of book-learning.
The main river in Indian culture has flowed in four streams,--the
Vedic, the Puranic, the Buddhist, and the Jain. It has its source in
the heights of the Indian consciousness. But a river, belonging to a
country, is not fed by its own waters alone. The Tibetan Brahmaputra
is a tributary to the Indian Ganges. Contributions have similarly
found their way to India's original culture. The Muhammadan, for
example, has repeatedly come into India from outside, laden with his
own stores of knowledge and feeling and his wonderful religious
democracy, bringing freshet after freshet to swell the current. To our
music, our architecture, our pictorial art, our literature, the
Muhammadans have made their permanent and precious contribution. Those
who have studied the lives and writings of our medieval saints, and
all the great religious movements that sprang up in the time of the
Muhammadan rule, know how deep is our debt to this foreign current
that has so intimately mingled with our life.
So, in our centre of Indian learning, we must provide for the
co-ordinate study of all these different cultures,--the Vedic, the
Puranic, the Buddhist, the Jain, the Islamic, the Sikh and the
Zoroastrian. The Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan will also have to be
added; for, in the past, India did not remain isolated within her own
boundaries. Therefore, in order to learn what she was, in her relation
to the whole continent of Asia, these cultures too must be studied.
Side by side with them must finally be placed the Western culture. For
only then shall we be able to assimilate this last contribution to our
common stock. A river flowing within banks is truly our own, and it
can contain its due tributaries; but our relations with a flood can
only prove disastrous.
There are some who are exclusively modern, who believe that the past
is the bankrupt time, leaving no assets for us, but only a legacy of
debts. They refuse to believe that the army which is marching forward
can be fed from the rear. It is well to remind such persons that the
great ages of renaissance in history were those when man suddenly
discovered the seeds of thought in the granary of the past.
The unfortunate people who have lost the harvest of their past have
lost their present age. They have missed their seed for cultivation,
and go begging for their bare livelihood. We must not imagine that we
are one of these disinherited peoples of the world. The time has come
for us to break open the treasure-trove of our ancestors, and use it
for our commerce of life. Let us, with its help, make our future our
own, and not continue our existence as the eternal rag-pickers in
other people's dustbins.
So far I have dwelt only upon the intellectual aspect of Education.
For, even in the West, it is the intellectual training which receives
almost exclusive emphasis. The Western universities have not yet truly
recognised that fulness of expression is fulness of life. And a large
part of man can never find its expression in the mere language of
words. It must therefore seek for its other languages,--lines and
colours, sounds and movements. Through our mastery of these we not
only make our whole nature articulate, but also understand man in all
his attempts to reveal his innermost being in every age and clime. The
great use of Education is not merely to collect facts, but to know
man and to make oneself known to man. It is the duty of every human
being to master, at least to some extent, not only the language of
intellect, but also that personality which is the language of Art. It
is a great world of reality for man,--vast and profound,--this growing
world of his own creative nature. This is the world of Art. To be
brought up in ignorance of it is to be deprived of the knowledge and
use of that great inheritance of humanity, which has been growing and
waiting for every one of us from the beginning of our history. It is
to remain deaf to the eternal voice of Man, that speaks to all men the
messages that are beyond speech. From the educational point of view we
know Europe where it is scientific, or at best literary. So our notion
of its modern culture is limited within the boundary lines of grammar
and the laboratory. We almost completely ignore the aesthetic life of
man, leaving it uncultivated, allowing weeds to grow there. Our
newspapers are prolific, our meeting-places are vociferous; and in
them we wear to shreds the things we have borrowed from our English
teachers. We make the air dismal and damp with the tears of our
grievances. But where are our arts, which, like the outbreak of
spring flowers, are the spontaneous overflow of our deeper nature and
spiritual magnificence?
Through this great deficiency of our modern education, we are
condemned to carry to the end a dead load of dumb wisdom. Like
miserable outcasts, we are deprived of our place in the festival of
culture, and wait at the outer court, where the colours are not for
us, nor the forms of delight, nor the songs. Ours is the education of
a prison-house, with hard labour and with a drab dress cut to the
limits of minimum decency and necessity. We are made to forget that
the perfection of colour and form and expression belongs to the
perfection of vitality,--that the joy of life is only the other side
of the strength of life. The timber merchant may think that the
flowers and foliage are mere frivolous decorations of a tree; but if
these are suppressed, he will know to his cost that the timber too
will fail.
During the Moghal period, music and art in India found a great impetus
from the rulers, because their whole life--not merely their official
life--was lived in this land; and it is the wholeness of life from
which originates Art. But our English teachers are birds of passage;
they cackle to us, but do not sing,--their true heart is not in the
land of their exile.
Constriction of life, owing to this narrowness of culture, must no
longer be encouraged. In the centre of Indian culture which I am
proposing, music and art must have their prominent seats of honour,
and not be given merely a tolerant nod of recognition. The different
systems of music and different schools of art which lie scattered in
the different ages and provinces of India, and in the different strata
of society, and also those belonging to the other great countries of
Asia, which had communication with India, have to be brought there
together and studied.
I have already hinted that Education should not be dragged out of its
native element, the life-current of the people. Economic life covers
the whole width of the fundamental basis of society, because its
necessities are the simplest and the most universal. Educational
institutions, in order to obtain their fulness of truth, must have
close association with this economic life. The highest mission of
education is to help us to realise the inner principle of the unity of
all knowledge and all the activities of our social and spiritual
being. Society in its early stage was held together by its economic
co-operation, when all its members felt in unison a natural interest
in their right to live. Civilisation could never have been started at
all if such was not the case. And civilisation will fall to pieces if
it never again realises the spirit of mutual help and the common
sharing of benefits in the elemental necessaries of life. The idea of
such economic co-operation should be made the basis of our University.
It must not only instruct, but live; not only think, but produce.
Our ancient _tapovanas_, or forest schools, which were our natural
universities, were not shut off from the daily life of the people.
Masters and students gathered fruit and fuel, and took their cattle
out to graze, supporting themselves by the work of their own hands.
Spiritual education was a part of the spiritual life itself, which
comprehended all life. Our centre of culture should not only be the
centre of the intellectual life of India, but the centre of her
economic life also. It must co-operate with the villages round it,
cultivate land, breed cattle, spin cloths, press oil from oil-seeds;
it must produce all the necessaries, devising the best means, using
the best materials, and calling science to its aid. Its very existence
should depend upon the success of its industrial activities carried
out on the co-operative principle, which will unite the teachers and
students and villagers of the neighbourhood in a living and active
bond of necessity. This will give us also a practical industrial
training, whose motive force is not the greed of profit.
Before I conclude my paper, a delicate question remains to be
considered. What must be the religious ideal that is to rule our
centre of Indian culture? The one abiding ideal in the religious life
of India has been _Mukti_, the deliverance of man's soul from the grip
of self, its communion with the Infinite Soul through its union in
_ananda_ with the universe. This religion of spiritual harmony is not
a theological doctrine to be taught, as a subject in the class, for
half an hour each day. It is the spiritual truth and beauty of our
attitude towards our surroundings, our conscious relationship with the
Infinite, and the lasting power of the Eternal in the passing moments
of our life. Such a religious ideal can only be made possible by
making provision for students to live in intimate touch with nature,
daily to grow in an atmosphere of service offered to all creatures,
tending trees, feeding birds and animals, learning to feel the immense
mystery of the soil and water and air.
Along with this, there should be some common sharing of life with the
tillers of the soil and the humble workers in the neighbouring
villages; studying their crafts, inviting them to the feasts, joining
them in works of co-operation for communal welfare; and in our
intercourse we should be guided, not by moral maxims or the
condescension of social superiority, but by natural sympathy of life
for life, and by the sheer necessity of love's sacrifice for its own
sake. In such an atmosphere students would learn to understand that
humanity is a divine harp of many strings, waiting for its one grand
music. Those who realise this unity are made ready for the pilgrimage
through the night of suffering, and along the path of sacrifice, to
the great meeting of Man in the future, for which the call comes to us
across the darkness.
Life, in such a centre, should be simple and clean. We should never
believe that simplicity of life might make us unsuited to the
requirements of the society of our time. It is the simplicity of the
tuning-fork, which is needed all the more because of the intricacy of
strings in the instrument. In the morning of our career our nature
needs the pure and the perfect note of a spiritual ideal in order to
fit us for the complications of our later years.
In other words, this institution should be a perpetual creation by the
co-operative enthusiasm of teachers and students, growing with the
growth of their soul; a world in itself, self-sustaining, independent,
rich with ever-renewing life, radiating life across space and time,
attracting and maintaining round it a planetary system of dependent
bodies. Its aim should lie in imparting life-breath to the complete
man, who is intellectual as well as economic, bound by social bonds,
but aspiring towards spiritual freedom and final perfection.
THE END
_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE
=GITANJALI. (Song Offerings. )= Translated by the Author. With an
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=GITANJALI AND FRUIT-GATHERING. =
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=CHITRA. A Play. = Translated by the Author. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
development of agriculture there came a period of settled life in our
history. The nomad ever moved on with his tents and cattle; he
explored space and exploited its contents. The cultivator of land
explored time in its immensity, for he had leisure. Comparatively
secured from the uncertainty of his outer resources, he had the
opportunity to deal with his moral resources in the realm of human
truth. This is why agricultural civilisation, like that of India and
China, is essentially a civilisation of human relationship, of the
adjustment of mutual obligations. It is deep-rooted in the inner life
of man. Its basis is co-operation and not competition. In other words,
its principle is the principle of home, to which all its outer
adventures are subordinated.
In the meanwhile, the nomadic life with its predatory instinct of
exploitation has developed into a great civilisation. It is immensely
proud and strong, killing leisure and pursuing opportunities. It
minimises the claims of personal relationship and is jealously careful
of its unhampered freedom for acquiring wealth and asserting its will
upon others. Its burden is the burden of things, which grows heavier
and more complex every day, disregarding the human and the spiritual.
Its powerful pressure from all sides narrows the limits of home, the
personal region of the human world. Thus, in this region of life,
women are every day hustled out of their shelter for want of
accommodation.
But such a state of things can never have the effect of changing woman
into man. On the contrary, it will lead her to find her place in the
unlimited range of society, and the Guardian Spirit of the personal in
human nature will extend the ministry of woman over all developments
of life. Habituated to deal with the world as a machine, man is
multiplying his materials, banishing away his happiness and
sacrificing love to comfort, which is an illusion. At last the present
age has sent its cry to woman, asking her to come out from her
segregation in order to restore the spiritual supremacy of all that is
human in the world of humanity. She has been aroused to remember that
womanliness is not chiefly decorative. It is like that vital health,
which not only imparts the bloom of beauty to the body, but joy to the
mind and perfection to life.
AN EASTERN UNIVERSITY
In the midst of much that is discouraging in the present state of the
world, there is one symptom of vital promise. Asia is awakening. This
great event, if it be but directed along the right lines, is full of
hope, not only for Asia herself, but for the whole world.
On the other hand, it has to be admitted that the relationship of the
West with the East, growing more and more complex and widespread for
over two centuries, far from attaining its true fulfilment, has given
rise to a universal spirit of conflict. The consequent strain and
unrest have profoundly disturbed Asia, and antipathetic forces have
been accumulating for years in the depth of the Eastern mind.
The meeting of the East and the West has remained incomplete, because
the occasions of it have not been disinterested. The political and
commercial adventures carried on by Western races--very often by
force and against the interest and wishes of the countries they have
dealt with--have created a moral alienation, which is deeply injurious
to both parties. The perils threatened by this unnatural relationship
have long been contemptuously ignored by the West. But the blind
confidence of the strong in their apparent invincibility has often led
them, from their dream of security, into terrible surprises of
history.
It is not the fear of danger or loss to one people or another,
however, which is most important. The demoralising influence of the
constant estrangement between the two hemispheres, which affects the
baser passions of man,--pride, greed and hypocrisy on the one hand;
fear, suspiciousness and flattery on the other,--has been developing,
and threatens us with a world-wide spiritual disaster.
The time has come when we must use all our wisdom to understand the
situation, and to control it, with a stronger trust in moral guidance
than in any array of physical forces.
In the beginning of man's history his first social object was to form
a community, to grow into a people. At that early period, individuals
were gathered together within geographical enclosures. But in the
present age, with its facility of communication, geographical barriers
have almost lost their reality, and the great federation of men, which
is waiting either to find its true scope or to break asunder in a
final catastrophe, is not a meeting of individuals, but of various
human races. Now the problem before us is of one single country, which
is this earth, where the races as individuals must find both their
freedom of self-expression and their bond of federation. Mankind must
realise a unity, wider in range, deeper in sentiment, stronger in
power than ever before. Now that the problem is large, we have to
solve it on a bigger scale, to realise the God in man by a larger
faith and to build the temple of our faith on a sure and world-wide
basis.
The first step towards realisation is to create opportunities for
revealing the different peoples to one another. This can never be done
in those fields where the exploiting utilitarian spirit is supreme. We
must find some meeting-ground, where there can be no question of
conflicting interests. One of such places is the University, where we
can work together in a common pursuit of truth, share together our
common heritage, and realise that artists in all parts of the world
have created forms of beauty, scientists discovered secrets of the
universe, philosophers solved the problems of existence, saints made
the truth of the spiritual world organic in their own lives, not
merely for some particular race to which they belonged, but for all
mankind. When the science of meteorology knows the earth's atmosphere
as continuously one, affecting the different parts of the world
differently, but in a harmony of adjustments, it knows and attains
truth. And so, too, we must know that the great mind of man is one,
working through the many differences which are needed to ensure the
full result of its fundamental unity. When we understand this truth in
a disinterested spirit, it teaches us to respect all the differences
in man that are real, yet remain conscious of our oneness; and to know
that perfection of unity is not in uniformity, but in harmony.
This is the problem of the present age. The East, for its own sake and
for the sake of the world, must not remain unrevealed. The deepest
source of all calamities in history is misunderstanding. For where we
do not understand, we can never be just.
Being strongly impressed with the need and the responsibility, which
every individual to-day must realise according to his power, I have
formed the nucleus of an International University in India, as one of
the best means of promoting mutual understanding between the East and
the West. This Institution, according to the plan I have in mind, will
invite students from the West to study the different systems of Indian
philosophy, literature, art and music in their proper environment,
encouraging them to carry on research work in collaboration with the
scholars already engaged in this task.
India has her renaissance. She is preparing to make her contribution
to the world of the future. In the past she produced her great
culture, and in the present age she has an equally important
contribution to make to the culture of the New World which is emerging
from the wreckage of the Old. This is a momentous period of her
history, pregnant with precious possibilities, when any disinterested
offer of co-operation from any part of the West will have an immense
moral value, the memory of which will become brighter as the
regeneration of the East grows in vigour and creative power.
The Western Universities give their students an opportunity to learn
what all the European peoples have contributed to their Western
culture. Thus the intellectual mind of the West has been luminously
revealed to the world. What is needed to complete this illumination is
for the East to collect its own scattered lamps and offer them to the
enlightenment of the world.
There was a time when the great countries of Asia had, each of them,
to nurture its own civilisation apart in comparative seclusion. Now
has come the age of co-ordination and co-operation. The seedlings that
were reared within narrow plots must now be transplanted into the open
fields. They must pass the test of the world-market, if their maximum
value is to be obtained.
But before Asia is in a position to co-operate with the culture of
Europe, she must base her own structure on a synthesis of all the
different cultures which she has. When, taking her stand on such a
culture, she turns toward the West, she will take, with a confident
sense of mental freedom, her own view of truth, from her own
vantage-ground, and open a new vista of thought to the world.
Otherwise, she will allow her priceless inheritance to crumble into
dust, and, trying to replace it clumsily with feeble imitations of the
West, make herself superfluous, cheap and ludicrous. If she thus
loses her individuality and her specific power to exist, will it in
the least help the rest of the world? Will not her terrible bankruptcy
involve also the Western mind? If the whole world grows at last into
an exaggerated West, then such an illimitable parody of the modern age
will die, crushed beneath its own absurdity.
In this belief, it is my desire to extend by degrees the scope of this
University on simple lines, until it comprehends the whole range of
Eastern cultures--the Aryan, Semitic, Mongolian and others. Its object
will be to reveal the Eastern mind to the world.
Of one thing I felt certain during my travels in Europe, that a
genuine interest has been roused there in the philosophy and the arts
of the East, from which the Western mind seeks fresh inspiration of
truth and beauty. Once the East had her reputation of fabulous wealth,
and the seekers were attracted from across the sea. Since then, the
shrine of wealth has changed its site. But the East is famed also for
her storage of wisdom, harvested by her patriarchs from long
successive ages of spiritual endeavour. And when, as now, in the midst
of the pursuit of power and wealth, there rises the cry of privation
from the famished spirit of man, an opportunity is offered to the East
to offer her store to those who need it.
Once upon a time we were in possession of such a thing as our own mind
in India. It was living. It thought, it felt, it expressed itself. It
was receptive as well as productive. That this mind could be of any
use in the process, or in the end, of our education was overlooked by
our modern educational dispensation. We are provided with buildings
and books and other magnificent burdens calculated to suppress our
mind. The latter was treated like a library-shelf solidly made of
wood, to be loaded with leather-bound volumes of second-hand
information. In consequence, it has lost its own colour and character,
and has borrowed polish from the carpenter's shop. All this has cost
us money, and also our finer ideas, while our intellectual vacancy has
been crammed with what is described in official reports as Education.
In fact, we have bought our spectacles at the expense of our eyesight.
In India our goddess of learning is _Saraswati_. My audience in the
West, I am sure, will be glad to know that her complexion is white.
But the signal fact is that she is living and she is a woman, and her
seat is on a lotus-flower. The symbolic meaning of this is, that she
dwells in the centre of life and the heart of all existence, which
opens itself in beauty to the light of heaven.
The Western education which we have chanced to know is impersonal. Its
complexion is also white, but it is the whiteness of the white-washed
class-room walls. It dwells in the cold-storage compartments of
lessons and the ice-packed minds of the schoolmasters. The effect
which it had on my mind when, as a boy, I was compelled to go to
school, I have described elsewhere. My feeling was very much the same
as a tree might have, which was not allowed to live its full life, but
was cut down to be made into packing-cases.
The introduction of this education was not a part of the solemn
marriage ceremony which was to unite the minds of the East and West in
mutual understanding. It represented an artificial method of training
specially calculated to produce the carriers of the white man's
burden. This want of ideals still clings to our education system,
though our Universities have latterly burdened their syllabus with a
greater number of subjects than before. But it is only like adding to
the bags of wheat the bullock carries to market; it does not make the
bullock any better off.
Mind, when long deprived of its natural food of truth and freedom of
growth, develops an unnatural craving for success; and our students
have fallen victims to the mania for success in examinations. Success
consists in obtaining the largest number of marks with the strictest
economy of knowledge. It is a deliberate cultivation of disloyalty to
truth, of intellectual dishonesty, of a foolish imposition by which
the mind is encouraged to rob itself. But as we are by means of it
made to forget the existence of mind, we are supremely happy at the
result. We pass examinations, and shrivel up into clerks, lawyers and
police inspectors, and we die young.
Universities should never be made into mechanical organisations for
collecting and distributing knowledge. Through them the people should
offer their intellectual hospitality, their wealth of mind to others,
and earn their proud right in return to receive gifts from the rest of
the world. But in the whole length and breadth of India there is not a
single University established in the modern time where a foreign or
an Indian student can properly be acquainted with the best products
of the Indian mind. For that we have to cross the sea, and knock at
the doors of France and Germany. Educational institutions in our
country are India's alms-bowl of knowledge; they lower our
intellectual self-respect; they encourage us to make a foolish display
of decorations composed of borrowed feathers.
This it was that led me to found a school in Bengal, in face of many
difficulties and discouragements, and in spite of my own vocation as a
poet, who finds his true inspiration only when he forgets that he is a
schoolmaster. It is my hope that in this school a nucleus has been
formed, round which an indigenous University of our own land will find
its natural growth--a University which will help India's mind to
concentrate and to be fully conscious of itself; free to seek the
truth and make this truth its own wherever found, to judge by its own
standard, give expression to its own creative genius, and offer its
wisdom to the guests who come from other parts of the world.
Man's intellect has a natural pride in its own aristocracy, which is
the pride of its culture. Culture only acknowledges the excellence
whose criticism is in its inner perfection, not in any external
success. When this pride succumbs to some compulsion of necessity or
lure of material advantage, it brings humiliation to the intellectual
man. Modern India, through her very education, has been made to suffer
this humiliation. Once she herself provided her children with a
culture which was the product of her own ages of thought and creation.
But it has been thrust aside, and we are made to tread the mill of
passing examinations, not for learning anything, but for notifying
that we are qualified for employments under organisations conducted in
English. Our educated community is not a cultured community, but a
community of qualified candidates. Meanwhile the proportion of
possible employments to the number of claimants has gradually been
growing narrower, and the consequent disaffection has been widespread.
At last the very authorities who are responsible for this are blaming
their victims. Such is the perversity of human nature. It bears its
worst grudge against those it has injured.
It is as if some tribe which had the primitive habit of decorating its
tribal members with birds' plumage were some day to hold these very
birds guilty of the crime of being extinct. There are belated
attempts on the part of our governors to read us pious homilies about
disinterested love of learning, while the old machinery goes on
working, whose product is not education but certificates. It is good
to remind the fettered bird that its wings are for soaring; but it is
better to cut the chain which is holding it to its perch. The most
pathetic feature of the tragedy is that the bird itself has learnt to
use its chain for its ornament, simply because the chain jingles in
fairly respectable English.
In the Bengali language there is a modern maxim which can be
translated, "He who learns to read and write rides in a carriage and
pair. " In English there is a similar proverb, "Knowledge is power. " It
is an offer of a prospective bribe to the student, a promise of an
ulterior reward which is more important than knowledge itself.
Temptations, held before us as inducements to be good or to pursue
uncongenial paths, are most often flimsy lies or half-truths, such as
the oft-quoted maxim of respectable piety, "Honesty is the best
policy," at which politicians all over the world seem to laugh in
their sleeves. But unfortunately, education conducted under a special
providence of purposefulness, of eating the fruit of knowledge from
the wrong end, _does_ lead one to that special paradise on earth, the
daily rides in one's own carriage and pair. And the West, I have heard
from authentic sources, is aspiring in its education after that
special cultivation of worldliness.
Where society is comparatively simple and obstructions are not too
numerous, we can clearly see how the life-process guides education in
its vital purpose. The system of folk-education, which is indigenous
to India, but is dying out, was one with the people's life. It flowed
naturally through the social channels and made its way everywhere. It
is a system of widespread irrigation of culture. Its teachers,
specially trained men, are in constant requisition, and find crowded
meetings in our villages, where they repeat the best thoughts and
express the ideals of the land in the most effective form. The mode of
instruction includes the recitation of epics, expounding of the
scriptures, reading from the Puranas, which are the classical records
of old history, performance of plays founded upon the early myths and
legends, dramatic narration of the lives of ancient heroes, and the
singing in chorus of songs from the old religious literature.
Evidently, according to this system, the best function of education
is to enable us to realise that to live as a man is great, requiring
profound philosophy for its ideal, poetry for its expression, and
heroism in its conduct. Owing to this vital method of culture the
common people of India, though technically illiterate, have been made
conscious of the sanctity of social relationships, entailing constant
sacrifice and self-control, urged and supported by ideals collectively
expressed in one word, _Dharma_.
Such a system of education may sound too simple for the complexities
of modern life. But the fundamental principle of social life in its
different stages of development remains the same; and in no
circumstance can the truth be ignored that all human complexities must
harmonise in organic unity with life, failing which there will be
endless conflict. Most things in the civilised world occupy more than
their legitimate space. Much of their burden is needless. By bearing
this burden civilised man may be showing great strength, but he
displays little skill. To the gods, viewing this from on high, it must
seem like the flounderings of a giant who has got out of his depth and
knows not how to swim.
The main source of all forms of voluntary slavery is the desire of
gain. It is difficult to fight against this when modern civilisation
is tainted with such a universal contamination of avarice. I have
realised it myself in the little boys of my own school. For the first
few years there is no trouble. But as soon as the upper class is
reached, their worldly wisdom--the malady of the aged--begins to
assert itself. They rebelliously insist that they must no longer
learn, but rather pass examinations. Professions in the modern age are
more numerous and lucrative than ever before. They need specialisation
of training and knowledge, tempting education to yield its spiritual
freedom to the claims of utilitarian ambitions. But man's deeper
nature is hurt; his smothered life seeks to be liberated from the
suffocating folds and sensual ties of prosperity. And this is why we
find almost everywhere in the world a growing dissatisfaction with the
prevalent system of teaching, which betrays the encroachment of
senility and worldly prudence over pure intellect.
In India, also, a vague feeling of discontent has given rise to
numerous attempts at establishing national schools and colleges. But,
unfortunately, our very education has been successful in depriving us
of our real initiative and our courage of thought. The training we get
in our schools has the constant implication in it that it is not for
us to produce but to borrow. And we are casting about to borrow our
educational plans from European institutions. The trampled plants of
Indian corn are dreaming of recouping their harvest from the
neighbouring wheat fields. To change the figure, we forget that, for
proficiency in walking, it is better to train the muscles of our own
legs than to strut upon wooden ones of foreign make, although they
clatter and cause more surprise at our skill in using them than if
they were living and real.
But when we go to borrow help from a foreign neighbourhood we are apt
to overlook the real source of help behind all that is external and
apparent. Had the deep-water fishes happened to produce a scientist
who chose the jumping of a monkey for his research work, I am sure he
would give most of the credit to the branches of the trees and very
little to the monkey itself. In a foreign University we see the
branching wildernesses of its buildings, furniture, regulations, and
syllabus, but the monkey, which is a difficult creature to catch and
more difficult to manufacture, we are likely to treat as a mere
accident of minor importance. It is convenient for us to overlook the
fact that among the Europeans the living spirit of the University is
widely spread in their society, their parliament, their literature,
and the numerous activities of their corporate life. In all these
functions they are in perpetual touch with the great personality of
the land which is creative and heroic in its constant acts of
self-expression and self-sacrifice. They have their thoughts published
in their books as well as through the medium of living men who think
those thoughts, and who criticise, compare and disseminate them. Some
at least of the drawbacks of their academic education are redeemed by
the living energy of the intellectual personality pervading their
social organism. It is like the stagnant reservoir of water which
finds its purification in the showers of rain to which it keeps itself
open. But, to our misfortune, we have in India all the furniture of
the European University except the human teacher. We have, instead,
mere purveyors of book-lore in whom the paper god of the bookshop has
been made vocal.
A most important truth, which we are apt to forget, is that a teacher
can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself. A lamp can
never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame.
The teacher who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living
traffic with his knowledge, but merely repeats his lessons to his
students, can only load their minds; he cannot quicken them. Truth not
only must inform but inspire. If the inspiration dies out, and the
information only accumulates, then truth loses its infinity. The
greater part of our learning in the schools has been wasted because,
for most of our teachers, their subjects are like dead specimens of
once living things, with which they have a learned acquaintance, but
no communication of life and love.
The educational institution, therefore, which I have in mind has
primarily for its object the constant pursuit of truth, from which the
imparting of truth naturally follows. It must not be a dead cage in
which living minds are fed with food artificially prepared. It should
be an open house, in which students and teachers are at one. They must
live their complete life together, dominated by a common aspiration
for truth and a need of sharing all the delights of culture. In former
days the great master-craftsmen had students in their workshops where
they co-operated in shaping things to perfection. That was the place
where knowledge could become living--that knowledge which not only has
its substance and law, but its atmosphere subtly informed by a
creative personality. For intellectual knowledge also has its aspect
of creative art, in which the man who explores truth expresses
something which is human in him--his enthusiasm, his courage, his
sacrifice, his honesty, and his skill. In merely academical teaching
we find subjects, but not the man who pursues the subjects; therefore
the vital part of education remains incomplete.
For our Universities we must claim, not labelled packages of truth and
authorised agents to distribute them, but truth in its living
association with her lovers and seekers and discoverers. Also we must
know that the concentration of the mind-forces scattered throughout
the country is the most important mission of a University, which, like
the nucleus of a living cell, should be the centre of the intellectual
life of the people.
The bringing about of an intellectual unity in India is, I am told,
difficult to the verge of impossibility owing to the fact that India
has so many different languages. Such a statement is as unreasonable
as to say that man, because he has a diversity of limbs, should find
it impossible to realise life's unity in himself, and that only an
earthworm composed of a tail and nothing else could truly know that it
had a body.
Let us admit that India is not like any one of the great countries of
Europe, which has its own separate language; but is rather like Europe
herself, branching out into different peoples with many different
languages. And yet Europe has a common civilisation, with an
intellectual unity which is not based upon uniformity of language. It
is true that in the earlier stages of her culture the whole of Europe
had Latin for her learned tongue. That was in her intellectual budding
time, when all her petals of self-expression were closed in one point.
But the perfection of her mental unfolding was not represented by the
singularity of her literary vehicle. When the great European countries
found their individual languages, then only the true federation of
cultures became possible in the West, and the very differences of the
channels made the commerce of ideas in Europe so richly copious and so
variedly active. We can well imagine what the loss to European
civilisation would be if France, Italy and Germany, and England
herself, had not through their separate agencies contributed to the
common coffer their individual earnings.
There was a time with us when India had her common language of culture
in Sanskrit. But, for the complete commerce of her thought, she
required that all her vernaculars should attain their perfect powers,
through which her different peoples might manifest their
idiosyncrasies; and this could never be done through a foreign tongue.
In the United States, in Canada and other British Colonies, the
language of the people is English. It has a great literature which had
its birth and growth in the history of the British Islands.
But when
this language, with all its products and acquisitions, matured by ages
on its own mother soil, is carried into foreign lands, which have
their own separate history and their own life-growth, it must
constantly hamper the indigenous growth of culture and destroy
individuality of judgement and the perfect freedom of self-expression.
The inherited wealth of the English language, with all its splendour,
becomes an impediment when taken into different surroundings, just as
when lungs are given to the whale in the sea. If such is the case even
with races whose grandmother-tongue naturally continues to be their
own mother-tongue, one can imagine what sterility it means for a
people which accepts, for its vehicle of culture, an altogether
foreign language. A language is not like an umbrella or an overcoat,
that can be borrowed by unconscious or deliberate mistake; it is like
the living skin itself. If the body of a draught-horse enters into the
skin of a race-horse, it will be safe to wager that such an anomaly
will never win a race, and will fail even to drag a cart. Have we not
watched some modern Japanese artists imitating European art? The
imitation may sometimes produce clever results; but such cleverness
has only the perfection of artificial flowers which never bear fruit.
All great countries have their vital centres for intellectual life,
where a high standard of learning is maintained, where the minds of
the people are naturally attracted, where they find their genial
atmosphere, in which to prove their worth and to contribute their
share to the country's culture. Thus they kindle, on the common altar
of the land, that great sacrificial fire which can radiate the sacred
light of wisdom abroad.
Athens was such a centre in Greece, Rome in Italy; and Paris is such
to-day in France. Benares has been and still continues to be the
centre of our Sanskrit culture. But Sanskrit learning does not exhaust
all the elements of culture that exist in modern India.
If we were to take for granted, what some people maintain, that
Western culture is the only source of light for our mind, then it
would be like depending for daybreak upon some star, which is the sun
of a far distant sphere. The star may give us light, but not the day;
it may give us direction in our voyage of exploration, but it can
never open the full view of truth before our eyes. In fact, we can
never use this cold starlight for stirring the sap in our branches,
and giving colour and bloom to our life. This is the reason why
European education has become for India mere school lessons and no
culture; a box of matches, good for the small uses of illumination,
but not the light of morning, in which the use and beauty, and all the
subtle mysteries of life are blended in one.
Let me say clearly that I have no distrust of any culture because of
its foreign character. On the contrary, I believe that the shock of
such extraneous forces is necessary for the vitality of our
intellectual nature. It is admitted that much of the spirit of
Christianity runs counter, not only to the classical culture of
Europe, but to the European temperament altogether. And yet this alien
movement of ideas, constantly running against the natural mental
current of Europe, has been a most important factor in strengthening
and enriching her civilisation, on account of the sharp antagonism of
its intellectual direction. In fact, the European vernaculars first
woke up to life and fruitful vigour when they felt the impact of this
foreign thought-power with all its oriental forms and affinities. The
same thing is happening in India. The European culture has come to us,
not only with its knowledge, but with its velocity.
Then, again, let us admit that modern Science is Europe's great gift
to humanity for all time to come. We, in India, must claim it from her
hands, and gratefully accept it in order to be saved from the curse of
futility by lagging behind. We shall fail to reap the harvest of the
present age if we delay.
What I object to is the artificial arrangement by which foreign
education tends to occupy all the space of our national mind, and thus
kills, or hampers, the great opportunity for the creation of a new
thought-power by a new combination of truths. It is this which makes
me urge that all the elements in our own culture have to be
strengthened, not to resist the Western culture, but truly to accept
and assimilate it; to use it for our sustenance, not as our burden; to
get mastery over this culture, and not to live on its outskirts as the
hewers of texts and drawers of book-learning.
The main river in Indian culture has flowed in four streams,--the
Vedic, the Puranic, the Buddhist, and the Jain. It has its source in
the heights of the Indian consciousness. But a river, belonging to a
country, is not fed by its own waters alone. The Tibetan Brahmaputra
is a tributary to the Indian Ganges. Contributions have similarly
found their way to India's original culture. The Muhammadan, for
example, has repeatedly come into India from outside, laden with his
own stores of knowledge and feeling and his wonderful religious
democracy, bringing freshet after freshet to swell the current. To our
music, our architecture, our pictorial art, our literature, the
Muhammadans have made their permanent and precious contribution. Those
who have studied the lives and writings of our medieval saints, and
all the great religious movements that sprang up in the time of the
Muhammadan rule, know how deep is our debt to this foreign current
that has so intimately mingled with our life.
So, in our centre of Indian learning, we must provide for the
co-ordinate study of all these different cultures,--the Vedic, the
Puranic, the Buddhist, the Jain, the Islamic, the Sikh and the
Zoroastrian. The Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan will also have to be
added; for, in the past, India did not remain isolated within her own
boundaries. Therefore, in order to learn what she was, in her relation
to the whole continent of Asia, these cultures too must be studied.
Side by side with them must finally be placed the Western culture. For
only then shall we be able to assimilate this last contribution to our
common stock. A river flowing within banks is truly our own, and it
can contain its due tributaries; but our relations with a flood can
only prove disastrous.
There are some who are exclusively modern, who believe that the past
is the bankrupt time, leaving no assets for us, but only a legacy of
debts. They refuse to believe that the army which is marching forward
can be fed from the rear. It is well to remind such persons that the
great ages of renaissance in history were those when man suddenly
discovered the seeds of thought in the granary of the past.
The unfortunate people who have lost the harvest of their past have
lost their present age. They have missed their seed for cultivation,
and go begging for their bare livelihood. We must not imagine that we
are one of these disinherited peoples of the world. The time has come
for us to break open the treasure-trove of our ancestors, and use it
for our commerce of life. Let us, with its help, make our future our
own, and not continue our existence as the eternal rag-pickers in
other people's dustbins.
So far I have dwelt only upon the intellectual aspect of Education.
For, even in the West, it is the intellectual training which receives
almost exclusive emphasis. The Western universities have not yet truly
recognised that fulness of expression is fulness of life. And a large
part of man can never find its expression in the mere language of
words. It must therefore seek for its other languages,--lines and
colours, sounds and movements. Through our mastery of these we not
only make our whole nature articulate, but also understand man in all
his attempts to reveal his innermost being in every age and clime. The
great use of Education is not merely to collect facts, but to know
man and to make oneself known to man. It is the duty of every human
being to master, at least to some extent, not only the language of
intellect, but also that personality which is the language of Art. It
is a great world of reality for man,--vast and profound,--this growing
world of his own creative nature. This is the world of Art. To be
brought up in ignorance of it is to be deprived of the knowledge and
use of that great inheritance of humanity, which has been growing and
waiting for every one of us from the beginning of our history. It is
to remain deaf to the eternal voice of Man, that speaks to all men the
messages that are beyond speech. From the educational point of view we
know Europe where it is scientific, or at best literary. So our notion
of its modern culture is limited within the boundary lines of grammar
and the laboratory. We almost completely ignore the aesthetic life of
man, leaving it uncultivated, allowing weeds to grow there. Our
newspapers are prolific, our meeting-places are vociferous; and in
them we wear to shreds the things we have borrowed from our English
teachers. We make the air dismal and damp with the tears of our
grievances. But where are our arts, which, like the outbreak of
spring flowers, are the spontaneous overflow of our deeper nature and
spiritual magnificence?
Through this great deficiency of our modern education, we are
condemned to carry to the end a dead load of dumb wisdom. Like
miserable outcasts, we are deprived of our place in the festival of
culture, and wait at the outer court, where the colours are not for
us, nor the forms of delight, nor the songs. Ours is the education of
a prison-house, with hard labour and with a drab dress cut to the
limits of minimum decency and necessity. We are made to forget that
the perfection of colour and form and expression belongs to the
perfection of vitality,--that the joy of life is only the other side
of the strength of life. The timber merchant may think that the
flowers and foliage are mere frivolous decorations of a tree; but if
these are suppressed, he will know to his cost that the timber too
will fail.
During the Moghal period, music and art in India found a great impetus
from the rulers, because their whole life--not merely their official
life--was lived in this land; and it is the wholeness of life from
which originates Art. But our English teachers are birds of passage;
they cackle to us, but do not sing,--their true heart is not in the
land of their exile.
Constriction of life, owing to this narrowness of culture, must no
longer be encouraged. In the centre of Indian culture which I am
proposing, music and art must have their prominent seats of honour,
and not be given merely a tolerant nod of recognition. The different
systems of music and different schools of art which lie scattered in
the different ages and provinces of India, and in the different strata
of society, and also those belonging to the other great countries of
Asia, which had communication with India, have to be brought there
together and studied.
I have already hinted that Education should not be dragged out of its
native element, the life-current of the people. Economic life covers
the whole width of the fundamental basis of society, because its
necessities are the simplest and the most universal. Educational
institutions, in order to obtain their fulness of truth, must have
close association with this economic life. The highest mission of
education is to help us to realise the inner principle of the unity of
all knowledge and all the activities of our social and spiritual
being. Society in its early stage was held together by its economic
co-operation, when all its members felt in unison a natural interest
in their right to live. Civilisation could never have been started at
all if such was not the case. And civilisation will fall to pieces if
it never again realises the spirit of mutual help and the common
sharing of benefits in the elemental necessaries of life. The idea of
such economic co-operation should be made the basis of our University.
It must not only instruct, but live; not only think, but produce.
Our ancient _tapovanas_, or forest schools, which were our natural
universities, were not shut off from the daily life of the people.
Masters and students gathered fruit and fuel, and took their cattle
out to graze, supporting themselves by the work of their own hands.
Spiritual education was a part of the spiritual life itself, which
comprehended all life. Our centre of culture should not only be the
centre of the intellectual life of India, but the centre of her
economic life also. It must co-operate with the villages round it,
cultivate land, breed cattle, spin cloths, press oil from oil-seeds;
it must produce all the necessaries, devising the best means, using
the best materials, and calling science to its aid. Its very existence
should depend upon the success of its industrial activities carried
out on the co-operative principle, which will unite the teachers and
students and villagers of the neighbourhood in a living and active
bond of necessity. This will give us also a practical industrial
training, whose motive force is not the greed of profit.
Before I conclude my paper, a delicate question remains to be
considered. What must be the religious ideal that is to rule our
centre of Indian culture? The one abiding ideal in the religious life
of India has been _Mukti_, the deliverance of man's soul from the grip
of self, its communion with the Infinite Soul through its union in
_ananda_ with the universe. This religion of spiritual harmony is not
a theological doctrine to be taught, as a subject in the class, for
half an hour each day. It is the spiritual truth and beauty of our
attitude towards our surroundings, our conscious relationship with the
Infinite, and the lasting power of the Eternal in the passing moments
of our life. Such a religious ideal can only be made possible by
making provision for students to live in intimate touch with nature,
daily to grow in an atmosphere of service offered to all creatures,
tending trees, feeding birds and animals, learning to feel the immense
mystery of the soil and water and air.
Along with this, there should be some common sharing of life with the
tillers of the soil and the humble workers in the neighbouring
villages; studying their crafts, inviting them to the feasts, joining
them in works of co-operation for communal welfare; and in our
intercourse we should be guided, not by moral maxims or the
condescension of social superiority, but by natural sympathy of life
for life, and by the sheer necessity of love's sacrifice for its own
sake. In such an atmosphere students would learn to understand that
humanity is a divine harp of many strings, waiting for its one grand
music. Those who realise this unity are made ready for the pilgrimage
through the night of suffering, and along the path of sacrifice, to
the great meeting of Man in the future, for which the call comes to us
across the darkness.
Life, in such a centre, should be simple and clean. We should never
believe that simplicity of life might make us unsuited to the
requirements of the society of our time. It is the simplicity of the
tuning-fork, which is needed all the more because of the intricacy of
strings in the instrument. In the morning of our career our nature
needs the pure and the perfect note of a spiritual ideal in order to
fit us for the complications of our later years.
In other words, this institution should be a perpetual creation by the
co-operative enthusiasm of teachers and students, growing with the
growth of their soul; a world in itself, self-sustaining, independent,
rich with ever-renewing life, radiating life across space and time,
attracting and maintaining round it a planetary system of dependent
bodies. Its aim should lie in imparting life-breath to the complete
man, who is intellectual as well as economic, bound by social bonds,
but aspiring towards spiritual freedom and final perfection.
THE END
_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE
=GITANJALI. (Song Offerings. )= Translated by the Author. With an
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